Paul in his home office. Behind him is his Apple II system. The
system
was hand delivered to Paul by Steve Jobs for use in the
development projects
talked about below. The Disk II disk drives with the are serial
numbered
3 and 4.

In 1977, I became very excited about these new microcomputers. I had
been working as a systems programmer on large IBM main frames (for
IBM)
for eight years. IBM's operating systems had become huge (many
megabytes!).
It had become so large that no one person could understand it all.
The
limited address space (64k) and possibility of owning my very own
personal
computer was very exciting. One day while visiting the Byte Shop
(the first
personal computer store), I came across a brochure and order
form for the new Apple II computer. It was truly amazing. I
had to
have one. Coincidental to this, I happen to see a small add in the
paper
from a company called Shepardson Microsystems. They were looking for
a
programmer. On a lark, I sent them my resume. A few days later I
went for
an interview. I learned that Bob Sephardson had just signed a
contract
with Apple Computer to write a Basic Interpreter. He offered me the
job
of writing it.

Two weeks later, I had left my safe, secure position with IBM to
work
at the three (now four) person company. Within days I had my very
own Apple
II work station. This computer was hand delivered to me by Steve
Jobs.
I learned that the Basic was go into Apple's next generation of
computer,
code named Apple Annie. Woz was very excited about this new
machine. It
was to have plug-in program ROM cartridges and lots of custom LSI.

One problem that we had to solve was that of getting 6502 object
code
files into the Apple II from our development system The
development system
consisted of a national COPS microprocessor with a 6502 compiler
created
by Bob Shepardson. The input to the compiler was a deck of punched
cards.
The output was paper tape. How do you read paper tape into an
Apple II?
Woz had the answer. He built a card for the Apple II that would
drive a
paper tape reader. One day while Woz I were setting up the tape
reader,
I noticed that Woz seemed depressed. I asked what was wrong. He
replied
that he had developed a floppy disk drive for the Apple II. He was
really
proud of that, but Apple's management had given him an impossible
schedule
for the delivery of both the hardware and the disk operating
system. I
said I could do the disk operating system (DOS). Woz was
delighted. After
a quick consultation with Bob Shepardson and Steve Jobs, Woz and I
started
to work.

When Woz showed me the designs of the disk
controller
hardware and software driver. I
was truly
amazed. At that time, all disk drive controllers were big cards
with dozens
of large and small scale integrated circuits. The design Woz
created required
only seven small scale integrated circuits. What was even more
amazing
was that Woz's design had significantly better performance ( data
density,
reliability, cost) than existing controllers. When Woz started
this design,
he did not look at how other people had done it. He thought about
how it
should be done. Using this process he created something
remarkable. This
became my real world example of what was to later be called
"thinking outside
the box." In my later life as an engineering manager, I have told
the Woz
Controller story to many engineers as way getting them thinking on
a different
path. Unfortunately, most engineers will never attain the level of
Steve
Wozniak's creativity.

It took Bob Shepardson and Steve Jobs a couple of weeks to
negotiate
the details (cost, schedule, re-scheduling the Basic, etc.) and
sign a
contract.
If you looked at this contract, you should be amazed. The cost to
Apple
was very small compared to the value Apple received. The schedule
was very
short considering the work to be done. The product specifications,
deliverables,
acceptance criteria, penalty/bonus clauses and legal mumbo jumbo
that I
have become used to in the years since were all missing. Those
were the
good old days!

Now that I was no longer doing the Basic and because we had other
work
coming in, Bob needed to hire another programmer. I knew the
perfect candidate.
Kathleen O'Brien, my life partner, was a very good programmer -
and we
worked well together. A few weeks later, Kathleen was Shepardson
Microsystems
employee number 5.

During the time I was working on the DOS, big changes where
happening
at Apple. They moved from their small office space behind the Good
Earth
Restaurant in Cupertino to their new World Wide Headquarters on
Bandly
drive. (We used to joke about the World Wide part. Apple was a
tiny start
up that had just begun delivering its first production products.
Shepardson
Microsystems did a lot of projects for similar small start up
companies
that were going nowhere. Why should Apple be any different? At one
point
Steve Jobs offered to buy Shepardson Microsystems to form the
nucleus for
Apple's software development organization. Bob refused the deal.
Steve
was only willing pay for the Shepardson Microsystems with Apple
stock.
Bob might have been more interested, but Steve would not increase
the offer
beyond 10% of Apple's stock.)

One of the big changes came when Apple hired Jeff Raskin to
manage Apple's
technical writing group. The task of writing the user manuals for
the DOS
and the new Basic fell on Jeff's shoulders. The task was
particularly difficult
since no form of specification existed for either product. Jeff
had a nearly
finished version of the DOS to work with. For the Basic, all he
had was
the syntax checker part of the code. Jeff's solution was to write
the manual
as the specification. This was all well and good, but Jeff had big
ideas.
As he was writing the manual, the specification for both products
grew
well beyond the scope of the original agreements. For DOS, this
lead to
several follow on, last minute contracts to cover Jeff's
additions. Fortunately,
the scope of the DOS changes where limited due to shipping
deadlines. This
was not the case with the Basic.

Our little Basic grew and grew and grew. It would no longer fit
in 48k
of RAM. We were going to have to develop code segmentation and
overlay
methods. Jeff acknowledged the size of this monster by naming it
NOTZO
BASIC. We called it NutSo Basic.

The final chapter in our association with Apple came soon after a
meeting
with Apple in October, 1978. I have scanned Randy Wigginton's
minutes of
this meeting. The meeting.gif file is
an small
image of the introduction to this document. The meeting.txt
file is an OCRed text file of the document. As you can see, the
first part
of meeting covers fixing some defects in the now shipping Apple
DOS 3.0.
The second part of the meeting covers discussion about the now
bloated
NOTZO Basic. I fixed the DOS defects by giving Apple a marked up listing.
The Basic problem was fixed a short time later, when Apple
canceled the
Apple Annie project and the Basic contract. We at Shepardson did
not mind.
Atari wanted us to write a Basic for their new Atari 800 computer.
That
is another story.....

Why was the first release of Apple DOS called Apple DOS 3.1?

Every time I recompiled the code, I incremented a revision
counter.
The counter started at Rev 0.1. Whenever I got to (n).9, I would
roll the
counter over to (n+1).0 The first listing I gave Apple was Rev
2.8. They
(I forget who) decided they could not call it DOS 2.8, so they
changed
it to DOS 3.0. Apple did the beta testing with this version (2.8
renamed
3.0). When Apple shipped the DOS for revenue, they incremented it
to 3.1
to indicate that the code had changed from the beta version. As a
final
note, when I transferred the source code to Apple in October, 1978
the
Rev number was up to 6.3.